


above the hollow place

by takingyournarrative



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Afterlife Discussion, Alternate Universe - Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Angst, Blood and Gore, But only a tiny bit, Hypothermia, M/M, gerrymichael, major character death four times depending how you count it, michael's questionable grip on sanity, with no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27593060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takingyournarrative/pseuds/takingyournarrative
Summary: And there were flowers on every surface to mask the smell of death, which followed Gerry everywhere despite his animation; and Michael wore perhaps too much perfume in the public market, and hurried away from anyone who got too close. They sat awake late at night and Michael twitched nervously at every sound from outside, and Gerry placed a hand on his cheek and turned him back to face him.“You’re safe,” mumbled Gerry, and Michael heard but did not listen.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael Shelley
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	above the hollow place

**Author's Note:**

> the gerrymichael server has incurable frankenstein au brainrot and i'm not immune.   
> you should also read "resurrection" and "remains" by hypnoshatesme, if you haven't already.  
> also, i took the title from the earthsea cycle by ursula k leguin and you should read that too.

It wasn’t enough. It was supposed to be — it  _ should have  _ been enough, but it was not. Gerry was back in his arms, not the same but warm and real and solid, and Michael was just angry. It made him sick. “I love you,” he said, and he meant it. “I love you,” he said, and he  _ meant it _ — he knew he meant it — but it wasn’t  _ enough _ of what he meant.  
_ I love you because despite the laws of nature, you’re here, because I decided you should be, because fuck them for trying to take you away from me. I love you because seeing you dead was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I love you because you were worth blood and skin and sickness and holding death in my hands night after night.   
_ “I love you,” he murmured again, burying his head in Gerry’s shoulder, and he felt one of Gerry’s hands settle heavy in his hair and wept.   
For a long time it was the sound of the rain, the thunder dying off over the mountains, Michael’s shoulders shaking with sobs, and the moon sliding like something diseased from behind the clouds, reflecting off the blood on the floor.   
“I love you, too,” said Gerry. Hoarse voice learning its way through vocal cords that were not his, hesitant words like he had almost forgotten their meaning. Michael’s crying stopped abruptly and he pulled back, looked Gerry in the eyes, and laughed.  
It was not a happy laugh. Slow, disbelieving, something desperate and relieved and bitter that crawled up the back of his throat, pulled the corners of his mouth into a parody of a smile, and spilled into the air between them only to fall. Gravity-bound. Shaking. The last two tarnished pennies in a cardboard box.  
“How are you feeling?”  
“Michael. Why am I here?”  
His face fell. “I — because I wanted you to be. I mean, your notes — surely you understand — I brought you back. I lost you, and I brought you back.” Tears pressing at the corners of his eyes; he shook them away.  
Gerry’s eyes widened (a little too much, the eyelids all too willing to collapse almost all the way into his eye sockets) and he turned his head slowly, taking in the table and the carnage and the research scattered across the lab, sanguine. “ _ Oh _ .”  
“Yeah. You’re — you’re safe now, it’s okay! I’ll just get you cleaned up, and myself cleaned up, and, um, the lab cleaned up—” he broke off again into hysterical giggles. “We’re fine! It’s fine. I’ve got you.” And he sank again into Gerry’s arms, rested his head on the jagged seam across his shoulder.  
“Oh, Michael. You really — you did it.”  
A happy sigh. “Yeah. Yeah, I really did.”  
They were quiet again for a moment. Michael still couldn’t shake the sickness, the  _ wrong  _ thing in the pit of his stomach. Something like anger. Something like dissatisfaction. Something like hunger. Gerry, he supposed, was too busy adjusting to his new life ( _ or half-life, or whatever it might be called _ , he thought, and frowned).    
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said after a while.  
“What question?”  
“How do you feel?”  
The last of the rain dripped onto the floor, heavy and hopeless.  
“It hurts,” whispered Gerry.  
Michael sat up all at once, took his face in his hands, touched the length of his arms, the line of his collarbone. “Where? What did I do wrong?”  
Gerry shook his head. “It doesn’t — not like that. It’s not one  _ specific  _ thing. Flaw in the experiment, I suppose; it just … hurts to  _ be  _ like this.”  
“Oh God. Oh, my God, Gerry…” he couldn’t remember if he had been this tearful before Gerry died. Mourning attire had been a lab coat and salt trails on his face, bloody flowers on his hands. There had been something before that, but it was a memory now, and maybe safety had never been real. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t know—”  
“Shh—” a finger pressed to his lips. “Hush, love, you couldn’t have known. I didn’t know. I’m going to be alright. You’re here, and —” a breath of a laugh “—and I’m here, and we’re going to make it.”   
“You think?”  
“I trust you.”  
Michael nodded, brushed the tears from his face with the back of a hand. He knew he was getting blood on his face, but what was the point in trying to avoid it? Blood got everywhere these days. He was saturated in it. And with nothing else to say or do, he helped Gerry off the platform and slung one of his arms — a little too heavy — over his shoulder, supported him out of the lab and down the hall, leaving bloody footprints on the floor.  
The bath was old and rusted, tarnished iron feet sinking into the wooden floor, and perhaps it would have been better to wash in the river, but it was dark and the banks had swelled high with rain anyway. Michael settled Gerry into the bath and considered whether it was reasonable to get in himself. There was too much blood. He sighed and turned the tap and went to wash his hands while it filled, trying to calm the shaking in his limbs before he returned.   
And then it was just a matter of making themselves clean — Michael was calm for a moment, washing the stains of his months of labor from Gerry’s borrowed skin, and perhaps in the back of his mind trying to accustom himself to the feeling of having someone to touch again, even if he didn’t feel quite the way he remembered.  
And really, it was impossible to tell whether it was some error in his attempt at creation that made it so, or whether he simply could not trust his own memories. So many times he had relived them — the feeling of Gerry’s face in his hands, his head on his shoulder, his mouth on Michael’s mouth — over and over until he had torn them to scraps and wrung the last drops of happiness out of them, until all he could feel at the recollection was a cold sense of longing and doubt.   
He ran his hands through Gerry’s hair until it was smooth and the last of the matted blood had been washed away, and decided it didn’t matter. The past would be the past, and Gerry was here now. He did not have to breathe false life into his old memories, too.   
Gerry was quiet — still getting used to his body, to his voice, and when Michael had drained the bath and run another to rinse in, the quiet hum of thanks was almost startling.   
“You’re welcome,” whispered Michael, and there was something like reverence in his voice.  
He had intended to bathe himself, but Gerry knelt patiently as he had and helped him, and it was all he could do to stay conscious and not dissolve entirely into the brush of Gerry’s fingers against his scalp, on his shoulders. When all was done Gerry hovered, hesitantly, and brushed a limp curl aside, his hands clumsy. “Can I kiss your forehead?” he asked, and it was so much like Gerry, the bluntness of the question, that Michael laughed.  
“Of course.”  
Gerry’s lips were very soft, and Michael tried and failed not to think about the fact that they had once belonged to someone else — about how long they had lain dormant beneath the ground. It was fine. It was — genuinely, he found, it was fine. Gerry did not stop at his brow, pressing kisses to his closed eyes, the tip of his nose, his cheeks. And after a moment it didn’t matter what he was made of, because he was Gerry, and the way he was gentle was Gerry, and the symmetrical pattern of his kisses, almost artistic, was achingly, overwhelmingly familiar.   
“You can kiss my mouth, you know,” mumbled Michael, almost a sigh. Without hesitation Gerry was there, and his hands were on Michael’s jaw, and it was everything Michael had remembered and nearly forgotten.  
He wanted to cry, and he did not, because this was too important, and Gerry was too soft with him to cry over.   
“I’ll clean the lab tomorrow,” he said. “We need sleep.”  
“Can I?” asked Gerry hesitantly, and Michael frowned. He hadn’t considered it.  
“I — I assume — I hope so? I suppose there’s no harm in trying.”   
“Unless sleeping … you know, if I don’t wake up.”  
“Don’t be ridiculous.” His voice shook. “Of course not. Sleeping never killed a healthy person, and you’re  _ perfectly  _ healthy. I — I made sure of it.”  
Gerry nodded, smiled at him. “Okay. It’s worth a try. If I can’t sleep, I can watch over you.”  
“Okay.”  
And Michael wasn’t certain whether Gerry could sleep, because his own exhaustion overtook him the moment he lay down, and he fell into a heavy and dreamless unconsciousness with only a momentary impression of arms around him for the first time in months.

Morning came uncharacteristically clear, and Gerry was humming and running his fingers through Michael’s curls. It sounded right. It sounded so good and right and natural and Michael sighed and pressed his face into Gerry’s chest, mumbling  _ good morning _ s.   
He still felt strange, like he should be doing more, and much as he wanted to he did not remain long in bed. The lab had to be cleaned and organized, and Gerry — “Gerry? Do you eat?”   
“I don’t know. I assume so. I think — yes, I think I am hungry.”  
Michael grinned. He was  _ alive _ . He needed to eat. He was real. “Good. You stay here, I’ll make breakfast.”  
Gerry nodded. He was so pale, but his eyes were familiar honey-gold and his hair was black as he had always wanted it to be.   
They ate well, and Michael consigned Gerry to bed rest while he went to work in the lab. He did not want Gerry to return there until it was clean — it had been bad enough the night before, worrying about his new-sighted eyes taking in the blood on every surface, the bones in the corner, the scraps of discarded skin — he shuddered again, at the door, and entered.  
Grisly, in the light of day. It always had been, and he had thought himself used to it, but a single morning of relative peace left him shaken again as though it were his first time looking on it, and he choked back sickness and rolled up his sleeves.  
He gathered what was left of the remains and piled them high in the fireplace, fearing for the smell but unsure what other options he had. Bones that had been too long or too short, smudged with sticky sanguine fingerprints. A pile of discarded eyes. Fingers, hands, none that had felt quite right in his own.  
He lit them, mumbled something that was half an apology and half a prayer, though he had given up believing in anyone that could answer a long time ago.  
The research was in his hands next, and he thought of burning it too, but shoved it instead into a drawer — it was too important, the only thing that really mattered next to Gerry because it had brought him back. And it was in a handwriting that maybe would never exist again, and though he had letters upon letters upstairs in that same hand, he would not burn a line of it.  
And then there was only blood — on the floor, on the walls, seeping into the corners and fermenting. He scrubbed at it all morning until the stone floors were only rust-stained, and that had to be enough, because he had left Gerry alone for far too long. He washed his hands as best he could, and if his fingers were stained a darker pink than they should be, he could pretend not to notice it.  
Gerry was sitting up in bed, still idly humming, staring blankly out the window. He looked genuinely — peaceful. Content. Michael sighed, watching him. He had done right by Gerry. He had done well. The world could not touch them here.   
“All done, honey,” he said, and Gerry turned to him.   
“How are you feeling?”  
Michael frowned and then schooled his face into a more calm expression, unwilling to let Gerry see how badly revisiting the remains of his genesis had shaken him. “I’m quite alright. Better than alright,” he added, crossing the room and draping himself over Gerry’s shoulders (perhaps slightly too broad). “I have you.”  _ Again,  _ he didn’t say. 

But as much as he told himself that he was content now, to love Gerry, to hold him and protect him and return to him from forays into the town, he knew it to be a lie. He could not shake that sickness — like the thing that had killed Gerry had poisoned something inside of him and it was spreading, and he could not trust  _ anyone _ , and love was an impossibility, unless it was Gerry he trusted and Gerry he loved and Gerry only against the whole hideous world.   
Gerry was weak. And Michael was doing his best to hide him, but it wasn’t enough. Someone had seen the lightning strike — surely — someone had spotted his shadow moving jerky and weighted-down from the graveyard, the head lolling off the figure in his arms. He was not safe. Gerry had not been and was not and would not be safe, and Michael was so terribly afraid to fail him for the second time.   
He locked the doors and checked the locks and checked them again. He met people’s eyes with a smile in the market, and searched them for suspicion, and grew afraid they would catch the distrust in his own eyes and smiled wider and repeated the motion, trying to make it appear a nervous fidget rather than a hunt. He shut the window-shades and turned on the oil lamps in the middle of the day, and still found time to take Gerry safely into the courtyard where he could feel the sun.   
“I love you,” said Michael, and he meant it.  
But it was not enough to love Gerry. There was fear, and there was anger, and he  _ hated  _ the world.   
“We’ve gone … above them, you know,” he murmured one night, head resting on Gerry’s chest, tracing idle patterns into his collarbone.   
“What?”  
“You and me. We — transcended humanity. You’re a God and I’m your disciple — or we’re just miraculous in our own right — I mean to say, what we have done is so far beyond the limits of anyone else’s comprehension, and you are  _ so  _ very beautiful and intelligent, and I hate them for trying to take that away from me. From us.”  
“Oh, Michael. Don’t hate them. They’re nothing less than you or I — I love you, Michael. We’re just fortunate.”  
Michael frowned, his hand going still. “That’s not true, though. We’re  _ impossible _ . We — you — I — we broke reality, Gerry. We don’t need it. I don’t want anything to do with it.” And his voice shattered and he was weeping, hot tears on Gerry’s skin that was never quite as warm as it should be.   
“Michael — my love, my darling —” but Gerry did not know what to say, and feared for this crack in Michael’s peace. He smiled and joked and laughed and acted as Gerry remembered, but there was something about the way he looked out the window, not in awe at the birds and the trees but in fear — something about the way his hands still shook, the way they twitched and he shuddered if he looked at them too long — the way sometimes he held Gerry as though he were desperate never to let go and afraid at the same time that he would fall apart in his embrace. “I love you,” said Gerry at last, and it was not enough of what he meant. 

And there were flowers on every surface to mask the smell of death, which followed Gerry everywhere despite his animation; and Michael wore perhaps too much perfume in the public market, and hurried away from anyone who got too close. They sat awake late at night and Michael twitched nervously at every sound from outside, and Gerry placed a hand on his cheek and turned him back to face him.   
“You’re safe,” mumbled Gerry, and Michael heard but did not listen. 

One of the neighbors called too closely one day. Inevitable, that someone would see him — Michael was out, and Gerry was in the parlor, and the neighbor came in uninvited to borrow cinnamon. Michael had always been generous with it before.   
She saw Gerry, down the hall and through the door, and called out to him — “Michael? Is that you?”  
He did not move. Willed her away. She did not leave but persisted, and when she came around his chair and saw him she screamed and ran, and the lungs that were not his and did not match choked on the cinnamon she left in the air.   
He mentioned it to Michael — of course he did. But he watched Michael’s eyes, that clear sweet grey, go dark, and he wished he had not.   
“Be careful, love,” he said. Michael did not hear.   
There was blood in the sink that night. 

Michael smiled at him across the dining table, and his face was warm and happy. He looked enamored. There should have been nothing here but love, but Gerry could remember what Michael had looked like in love, and it was not this. Or rather, it was, but there was  _ more  _ here than quiet, open adoration. Something was locked in his eyes; something was desperate and afraid in his smile. He took Gerry’s hand and he was radiant like the sun, and there was no trace of blood on him other than perhaps a faint smell of it.

He forgave Michael, because he was Michael, and he was hurting, and he had torn apart his heart and mind to bring Gerry back, and it was not  _ for  _ Gerry to begrudge him the consequences. But it tore at him, at his artificial heart, and he lay awake long hours and watched Michael sleep.   
He looked the same in sleep as he had before. Unworried, unafraid. Gerry remembered — vaguely, as if through a warped glass — the openness of Michael’s face. He had given trust as easily as he had given his heart, trading freely in the most vital parts of himself. He had felt safe.   
It was unfair. It was unfair to think this way about Michael, sweet brave Michael who had broken himself to patch Gerry back together. It was his turn, that was all; to sew the torn edges of Michael’s mind back together with a steadier hand.   
And if there was blood in the sink again, and again, he would forgive him as many times as necessary, and try to push down the fear. 

“Michael,” said Gerry, and Michael stopped kissing the scars on his face and looked at him gravely.  
“Gerry?”  
“We’re safe here, Michael. I love you. I love you.” As though he could convince Michael to let his  _ I love you _ s be enough for him; as though Michael had not found himself dancing with vengeance and unwilling to let go. Gerry was not certain what or who Michael was trying to avenge himself on — he had not mentioned Gerry’s fellow researchers, or the men who had come under the stars to take him — he mumbled about a broken world often enough for Gerry to suspect that there was not rhyme or reason to his actions. He killed because someone looked suspicious, or got too close, or saw Gerry sitting in a chair down the hall.  
“I love you, too!” said Michael, and Gerry allowed himself to believe he sounded better already.

Michael brought one of them home. He had been in the garden, he explained, holding the man fast — and the man was rambling — “I wasn’t — I didn’t — I don’t know anything about you, I don’t know who you are, I just wanted food — I’ve been hungry —” and Gerry watched Michael’s eyes flash and knew that loving him had not been enough.   
“Michael, stop.”  
“What are you talking about, Gerry? He wants — he wants to hurt you.”  
“He doesn’t, Michael. Please.”  
The room was dark but he thought he saw Michael crying; and then the glint of a blade raised high in the air and the man was  _ screaming,  _ pleading with Michael to let him go, and Michael could not or would not hear.   
Gerry moved forward all at once, shoved Michael off of the man, and Michael shouted and struggled back — again, Gerry pushed at him but he persisted — “Michael,  _ please _ ” — but Michael would not hear him and in a panic he felt himself almost forget to be soft.  
He had been trying so hard to remain gentle and unfrightening for Michael. He knew  what he was; he could feel the way his body was bound in electricity from the inside out, the way his skin was too soft but would not yield for anything. He knew Michael’s stitches would not tear and his arms would not fail him.  
So there was nothing else to do but stand back, because if he tried to stop Michael now he would surely kill him; and it was not fair to bargain in human lives but if the man on the floor had to die for Michael to live, he would not intercede.   
But Michael was not strong. Michael was weak and uncoordinated and did not know what he was doing. The knife slipped from his hands and the man caught it, and before Gerry had registered the change Michael fell.  
It was not a friendly blade. Nothing so small and cheap that Gerry could take it from him and sew him back up while he still lived. The sound he made was not a scream, choked with blood already rising to his throat. He toppled to the side, and the knife moved again, tearing the wound wider still. He crumpled in a way that was too heavy to be human.  
There was silence, except for the sobbing of the man on the floor.   
“Go,” said Gerry, and his voice shook. “Tell nobody and — and go.”  
The man staggered to his feet and ran, and Gerry moved slowly, as if in a dream, to Michael’s crumpled form.   
“Michael, I’m sorry — are you okay?”  
Nothing. He was choking, he was drowning already —  
“Michael?”  
He touched him and he was still, so completely still; he put two fingers to his pulse and nothing mattered, and nothing had ever mattered, and nothing, nothing would ever matter again.   
There was nothing to do.  
He could not cry. He could not collapse weeping over Michael’s broken body. There was no earth-shattering scream; there were no gods at the bottom of the sea to listen to his grief. He was frozen, immobile.   
He swallowed the shadows in the corners of the room and let them grow in him like a mold. He suffocated from the inside out.   
_ This is why. This is why he brought me back. This is worse than death.  
_ But why then had he left him behind — why had his mind gone so far from the two of them in the end — where had his Michael vanished to?  
Would the same happen to him if he picked Michael up — cradled him gently in his arms, a sleeping lover and nothing more — if he carried him to the lab and placed him on the platform and waited?  
He sewed the wound in Michael’s stomach while he hovered; there was nothing to do until a storm came. He did not search for his research. He had memorized it. Michael had loved that about him, his quick memory.   
If he had moved faster, if he had not overestimated his own strength — what arrogance, to think he was capable of hurting Michael! — if he had loved him more, or better, if he had not been so blind, not allowed him to slip this far past recognition. Perhaps he had not even been afraid of hurting Michael in those last moments; in truth, perhaps he had been afraid for himself. Michael with a knife in his hands and a dark thing in his eyes. If he had not been afraid of the person he was meant to love, then.  
Storms were far from uncommon but days passed every second was an age, and no matter how many apologies he murmured over Michael’s bloodied face he would never have spoken enough of them.   
He wanted to clean the blood from him but he could not move — he would not now leave Michael’s side. He did not deserve anything but this, to stare at the body of the man he loved until lightning and thunder forced him briefly away.   
When the first drop of rain fell it landed like a tear on Michael’s cheek, and Gerry brushed it away and hovered for only a moment before retreating. The storm came fast and dark over the mountains and high winds blew the leaves from the locust trees into the lab. A plague.   
He heard the far-off growlings of thunder and trembled, and counted the seconds. A child’s game. Singing ring-around-the-rosy while dying of Black Death.   
Lightning broke at last over the house, plunged in vicious to wrap around Michael, fractals or veins or something worse.   
It was gone.   
There was smoke in the air, and the man on the platform was already stirring.   
“Michael!”  
“Oh, God. Oh, my God. Gerry?”  
" Michael— come here, my love, my everything — I’m so sorry — you do not have to forgive me, you can leave —”  
“Gerry, no, thank God.” He reached for him, eyes already wide and staring, hair tumbling shadow-gold over his shoulders. Too pale and too cold to the touch, but alive. “Thank you. Thank you, honey.”  
“Michael, you were going to kill him — he didn’t do anything.”  
“You don’t know that,” Michael snapped.   
“I —” but it was no good arguing, not tonight. “Come rest, love.”

“You didn’t tell me death was like that,” Michael said when they were washed of his blood and in bed.   
“Like what?” He knew.   
“Like — nothing at all.”  
“You were upset and afraid. I didn’t want to make it worse.”  
“I still am.”  
And Gerry gathered him close to his chest and pressed his face into his hair, begging him silently to listen to his breathing and learn not to fear. 

He did not learn how not to fear. If anything, he was in more of a panic than ever — he looked almost human, but he had lain dead too long to be quite right. An eye that listed a little too far to one side, a face almost bloodless, fingertips too cold and soft. He was afraid to go into the town, and afraid to be seen, and more angry at the world than he had been before. It was a toxin. The blood of others in his hands and his veins and his mind.   
“You left him alive?” he said of the man he had died trying to kill.    
Gerry looked at him, saw terror in his eyes, and shook his head. “I took care of him.”  
If Michael knew it was a lie, he was merciful for once and did not pursue it. But he would not let go of his fear; he was afraid, always and irrevocably afraid, and fear curdled into anger and if he had been able to leave the house, he would have stopped bothering to hide the blood on his hands.   
He begged Gerry to leave with him, to avenge themselves on the people who had wronged them — and Gerry begged him not to think of them, to think instead of healing together, their quilted bodies and decomposing minds. Neither of them would yield. The last of their trust would be lost soon, perhaps, and then they would be alone.   
“Let’s go North,” said Gerry, finally. “Sannikov Land.”  
_ Zemlya Sannikova.  _ One of Gerry’s geologic fantasies, a dream-island in Russia, half-real or possibly a lie. Michael had always laughed at it before, but there was lightning in his blood, so he just hummed. “Why?”  
“A compromise. You can escape reality for a while. And we can heal away from other people. We’ll be safe in every sense of the word.”  
Michael sighed into the dark. “Yes.”

Maps too-large and elaborate, and coats over too-resilient shoulders, and scarves and hats wrapped high on Gerry’s face to hide his scars. A boat bound northward and a silent captain who knew more than he would say. A verdant shore hovering out of a mist tinged faintly pink.   
Michael clung to Gerry as they left the ship. The ground was warm — warmer than it should be, a false warmth like the warmth of their skin. A warmth that vanished when the ship retreated into the fog and they began to climb, and the air grew colder and snow gathered out of nowhere.   
The wind rose. Michael held tighter to Gerry and they pushed forward for the promise of a cave or a ledge or  _ somewhere _ safe and dry, but there was none.   
“I’m sorry,” said Gerry, and the wind forced them into the snow.   
It was far too cold. Gerry opened his arms with some difficulty and Michael curled up in them, let Gerry press his lips to his forehead and mumble apologies as the snow began to gather above them.   
“Shh,” said Michael after a while. “Sing to me instead.”

The song died on Gerry’s lips at a time that did not exist; the snow blew over the mountain, silver-white and blue; Sannikov Land breathed their final breaths for them and once again never existed. 


End file.
